Meanwhile Elsewhere...

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Prepare yourself. Eat well, but avoid
meats and stay to fish. Healthfood is in general good for this. Clean
your intestines – papaya and pinapple are two excellent choises for
the amateur. Stay away from alcohol and drugs. Exersize, meditation,
yoga are all good – the better prepared you are physically and
mentally the more the medicine will be able to help you.

Liquer will also help you manage a bad trip if you cant deal with your shit.

While some drugs mix well with yage, drugs other than alcohol is usually frowned upon. Out of respect for
the shaman one does not do such things. The big NO though is cocaine
witch have been known to kill in combination with yage. The holy ganja is said to close your vision.

As to alcohol: a few drinks of 'la dama
blanca' (aguardiente) after a long night with 'la dama negra' (yage)
is a very pleasant experience.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The
first time I participated in
a Yage [ayahuascha] ceremony I was pretty green. Almost literally
fresh off the boat from Panama. Well,
that's a lie.
I already had a few months here in Colombia, and a few of years in diverse Latin,
Asian and European countries. But even as a relatively
experienced psychonaut
I had no idea what to expect.

I
was introduced to the legend of Ayahuascha a few years back (on my
way to Santiago de Compostella) by a young gringo, and ever since;
it was my interest to experience this at first opportunity. Making my
way slowly south from Oaxaca (Mexico),
I had expected to first encounter the
medicine in Peru, but when
an earlier opportunity presented itself,
I grabbed at the chance.

Chachaui
is sort of in the middle of nowhere. The place, a beautiful resort,
just a little too
perfect; the shaman, even with my zero-experience, seemed to me more
of a more of a showman than a shaman.
I’ve done my journeys with psilocybin,
LSD&ETC
and I was somewhat disappointed
as, after shitting (a yage-ceremony is literally a shit-fest) and
puking I experienced a buzz equal to 5 beers, 2 joints and a mushroom
cookie.

But
I was excited to meet my people (deep travelers); and I was even more
excited to see that this ceremony drew not only psychonauts
young and old, but also children and the elderly.

The
morning after I heard a very interesting exchange of opinions between
my guide and an unnamed young yagezero1
(I think the bloke was Finnish, but who
knows, I didn't ask). My guide had a few criticisms
concerning the ceremony, there were
a few thinly veiled insults, but «shamana
pirata» was the one that
stuck out for me. The yagezero norteno reacted with a zeal one only
sees in acolytes.
'Don't speak bad about my master. You two are not welcome here no
more'.

I
was neutral. Listening. This was a new world for me, and while my guide came
highly recommended,
I did not know her very well and I had never even heard of such a
thing as a «shamana pirata». But the moment my guide swayed my mind
and I lost faith in the acolyte
was when she asked the young man 'In
more than one hundred people at the ceremony, why am I the only
Colombian here? We are in Colombia, no? Shamanism is an integral part
of our culture, no?'

I
went on to Putomayo and Sibundoy, in part for the Fiesta del Perdon, but also to visit the renowned
shaman Taita Florentino 'Floro' Agreda. A couple of days after the
ceremony with Floro I somehow ended up doing a 'purging' with him –
which in essence is a medicine that makes you feel like those moments
of alcohol poisoning that
you can hardly remember and after puking you pass out. But this lasts for six hours, and you do not black
out.

I
was not very impressed with Yage or Shamanism. I did not really
achieve
anything close to what I have achieved
with other 'drugs'. (Once God, or some succubi who lie well, or a
drug induced psychosis,
fucked me on LSD while I was journeying alone in the mountains, and I
had a 45 minute
orgasm. That might be a tad personal: but just so you can keep the
perspectives in mind: GOD fucked me on LSD. On Yage I felt vaguely MDMA'y.

But
over the next few months I did notice a few changes in my self. I was
more healthy, physically and mentally. And independent
on your spiritual standpoint, if you belive in God or Alchemy, I was
attracting more attention. Maybe only because I was losing
weight and gaining a more appealing complexion – maybe because,
like the new-age-freaks told me: I had cleaned my energy.

OJOS
DE JAGUAR expedition II [Eyes of the Jaguar]

A
few months later I was invited to an expedition in the Amazonas,to do Yage
at the source with
my guide from earlier, Berenice Tari Leon Salazar. And while I was
not very impressed with Yage, and had my well founded fears of guerrillas, robbers, fevers, deadly animals and whatnot,
I was now under the impression that Yage was a medicine and not a
drug, and that my physical and mental change over the last few months
was ample proof that whatever this medicine did to me was working.

More
than that, I was damaged by books as a child. I read stories of
adventurers and wanted to be one. And dangers aside, sailing the
amazon river, living in a jungle village more or less like the locals
do:
shitting in
the jungle and washing both clothes and bodies in the river really
does sound like a lot of fun to my damaged mind.

And
they told me Yage would be stronger at the source. I didn’t
believe them. I don't believe
in magic. The holy ganja is much the same in Kathmandu as in
Kingston. Ibuprofene strikes me as excactly the same in Bangkok and
Bogota. (Only in New Mexico there are different drugs, but after
the tragic demise of Walther White this
is only legend and not reality, 'They' tell me.)

Also,
it has been claimed by my guide – obviously selling her expedition
- that 96 year old Abuelo Guillermo Lucitante is (one of) the best shaman(s) in
the world. His fame is great in America, he lectures in countries far
away (last I heard he was down Mexico-way lecturing to the masters of
peyote), and he is sought out by many a sick person and shaman in
search of healing and wisdom.
There are
even stories of tibetan monks and European shamans coming a-long
way looking for his counsel. (Follow-up story coming on Abuelo Lucitante...)

But
the experience was indeed different. My scientific mind tells me I
was better prepared. I had a more profound understanding
of what is this Yage. And for whatever reason my body and mind were
cleaner. Objectively because
I was doing fewer
drugs like, alcohol, and, whatever, and eating fewer
hamburgers and more salads and fruits
I was thus far more susceptible
to the medicine. Subjectively,
I had improved my ability to navigate during the journey.

I
had some interesting experiences and one of the grandest adventures
of my life. Faced some dæmons. Did some magic. Changed my face and
quite possibly my fate. Not that there weren’t
some sketchy moments. People die doing
this. (See next post «Yagezero ProTips»). And one night I to met
with Death
in a journey. It was not a 'bad trip', not at all. But I had faced
two of my dæmons, and I was exhausted. And I talked to Yage2
and said,
“I am
exhausted, I only want to sleep.”
And Yage told
me «If you want rest, I will grant it to you.» But implied was my
death; there would be no rest. Not that night. But I do sleep better
now.

Ojos
de Jaguar III will leave from Bogota the 14th of December 2014 and
return the 22nd. Expedition IV will be held from the 28th of march til the 5th of april in 2015. If you need healing and adventure, change or just a plain miracle... contact me for help.

1A
«yagezero» is a person that has
made shamanism and specifically
yage an
integral part of her lifestyle and expression, like for instance a
punk or maybe even a hipster – but you can obviously be a yagezero
hipster punk if you are properly desperate to express your
«personality»

2A
Spirit/God, or excellent
focus for self-hypnosis
if you don't believe
in these things, more than a medicine or drug.

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

My last (published) post was way back on October
6th of 2010. In the Meanwhile I have been experiencing
divorce Elsewhere.

I don't even remember what, if
anything, I wrote at the time about this. But I was not happy. I had
spent more or less 24 hours a day with a wonderful woman for 7 years.
We spent about 6 months being in love, but chaste. Then, after that
early morning when she first came home with me; she never left. It
was her 21th birthday, and the year after I proposed on
her birthday, and the year after we got married, and the marriage
lasted about 5 years.

I needed to know if being in a
relationship was what made me so unhappy. My parents got divorced
when I was 5 because my dad had this idea he liked males more than
females (there is more to that story, but, you know, not now: ask me
later). My mother, still alive, may I outlive her to save her that
pain, never had a new man. When she is drunk and we have one of our
talks, she claims to have had lovers, and I both hope and belive it
is true – because sometimes she reminds me more of a nun than a
mum: but she clearly is a woman. My father had a couple of
relationships, in the end he even married an older man; but they
lived apart.

For me, to be a good husband to her, I
needed to know if maybe I was made to be alone. I needed to know if
she was suffering me, or if I was suffering her. My camino two years
previous had convinced me I needed to do another camino, longer and
solitare – and now I had come to a point in my life were that was
much needed.

It took me more than a hundred days –
from Bordeaux to Finisterre and Beyond - but in the end I was not
only converted to some sort of a theist, but I also knew in the
depths of my soul that I was not made to be alone. And when I came
back I was finally ready to be the man she deserved. That man she had
seen and fallen in love with and married. That man that had only
existed as potential.

But in the Meanwhile she had been given
the time to discover she were likely to be more happy Elsewhere.

Since then I have mostly been
traveling. Brazil, Mexico, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands,
Nepal, Poland, Spain, France. I tried moving back home for a while, a
couple of times. But that was hard for me. And in the end They raised
the rent for my apartment by about 50%, and my struggle to live like
a decent normal and private person went wherever lost causes go and
since february 2013 I've lived in the houses of friends, girlfriends,
hostels and hotels in Spain and then across northern latin america.

First I went to this girl I was in love
with in Spain, but that went to shit in record speed. Then, I was
trying to decide what-next, when a friend needed me in Mexico. So
Mexico it was. And then when my friend no longer needed me, I went
to San Cristobal in Chiapas and there I pondered long and hard where
to go next. I wasn't able to write, and I wasn't able to push myself
to do much constructive work but reading. But being on the verge of
speaking some sort of spanish, and being here, and having my
camino-experiences as to what traveling with certain rules does to
your apreciation of time and space...

... I decided to start traveling
towards the south end of the continent without using areoplanes. I
skipped Belize, took a month in Guatemala, dropped by Honduras and El
Salvador, spent a little more time in Nicaragua, kinda hated on
Panama and took the boat to Carthagena, Colombia, and now I am in
Bogota after more than half a year here.

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

- running stamina and parkeur.
- judo and kramaga (ideally tai chi and french boxing as well + military-approved combatstyles)
- swordfighting
- some urban climbing-skills, but that's really more of a parkeur-thing.
- chemistry for poisons, traps and all sorts of devious contraptions.
- enough familiarity with handguns to wield them ambidextrously and with deadly precision while moving.

Now all I need is an old and wise master who has unending patience with me because he has decided I am the chosen one and an old and sinister villian with strange ties to the old and wise master.